This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

NICE, FRANCE—Dominique Strauss-Kahn can’t keep it in his pants, out of hotel maids’ mouths or wallflower shy and folded away at orgies.

These extracurricular — and extramarital — walkabouts of his off-the-leash male member have all been acknowledged by the former head of the International Monetary Fund or any from among a posse of defence lawyers, one of whom this week described his client as being persecuted for no more than “simple libertine activity.”

Not urbanely irresistible, however, The Great Seducer, as he was once known in France, exposed as no better than garden-variety john, even if the money didn’t come directly out of his own pocket and the ladies procured by others, possibly even cops-cum-pimps associated with an alleged prostitution ring.

Article Continued Below

To be clear: The sexagenarian’s amorality is of no concern to anybody else, except maybe his wife. Tolerant in that Gallic shrugging way, the enormously wealthy Anne Sinclair can hardly be described as long-suffering, not with all her bolting options. Nor are the sophisticated and shock-proof French about to get judgmentally exercised over a political luminary (passim) enjoying the company of contemporary courtesans, which is a nice way of saying hookers, at the Carlton hotel in Lille and perhaps love shacks as far afield as Washington D.C.

Cash-for-coitus, though, if those euro and dollars were funneled through company expense accounts and forked over to some cross-border prostitution enterprise — even worse, with services exacted from coerced sex trade workers, which has certainly been implied — would spell the absolute public life end for a man who really did think he could rehabilitate himself following last year’s misadventures in Gotham.

Had events not conspired (as in alleged political conspiracy) against him, the 62-year-old would likely have been Socialist party candidate in the upcoming presidential election against incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy. Instead, Strauss-Kahn was bundled into a police station on Monday, charged with “aggravated pimping as part of an organized crime.” Cameras caught him doing the perp’s hand-up photo-block upon being released on 100,000 euro bail. The charges, while anticipated among those who’ve been following the months-long police investigation of the purported pimping ring, came two days earlier than expected.

For the unapologetically priapic Strauss-Kahn, this must be getting almost old hat. No doubt he still considers himself a boulevardier and his sexual shenanigans hardly the stuff of criminality. But his brushes — brush-offs — with the law are also racking up huge legal bills. Fortunately, a wealthy wife can pay them.

“He firmly declares that he is not guilty of these acts and never had the least inkling that the women he met could have been prostitutes,” huffed Richard Malka, of the Team Dominique legal squad. “Through this prosecution they are trying to create a new crime punishing clients of prostitution where the law does not provide for this.

“As a result of behaviour that is purely his own business, Mr. Strauss-Kahn has found himself largely because of his fame thrown to the wolves, by coincidence less than a month before a major election.”

Former friends in the party are giving him a wide berth. Perhaps this is all just dirty politics after all. But at the moment, on the surface, it’s just a dirty old man.

More infamy than fame, in fact, with Strauss-Kahn’s U.S. lawyers due in court Wednesday for a first hearing in the civil case brought by Nafissatou Diallo after her criminal accusation torpedoed a year ago. Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea, was the Sofitel Hotel maid who claimed Strauss-Kahn, still then with the IMF, had forced her into a sexual act when he emerged naked from the bathroom as she entered the presidential suite. Strauss-Kahn didn’t deny an intimate episode occurred but insisted it was consensual. DNA evidence retrieved from outside the bathroom door showed her saliva mixed with his semen.

Seven charges were laid hastily — Strauss-Kahn had been booked to fly out of New York that same afternoon, hence the hop-to-it indicting of a diplomat — including attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment and the defendant was eventually placed under house arrest for a month. But on Aug. 23, all the charges were dropped, the district attorney filing a motion for dismissal because “the nature and the number of the complainant’s falsehoods is unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Diallo had told a number of fibs, and repeated them to a grand jury, most damagingly never mentioning her mystifying in-and-out visits to that presidential suite as well as another VIP unit on the same floor, all of which were later traced in the computerized trail left by her key card.

So Strauss-Kahn gets the benefit of the doubt on that one, guilty only of apparently eliciting quickie oral sex — before being caught on surveillance cameras leaving the hotel to meet his daughter for lunch. Ewww.

Back in France, Strauss-Kahn faced more accusations of predatory sexual misconduct when author Tristane Banon told police he’d tried to rape her in 2002. In that incident, wherein Strauss-Kahn had spent all of nine minutes in a suite with the alleged victim — he comes and goes fast — no charges were filed, even though police said there had been “prima facie” evidence of a sexual assault having occurred. But it all happened too long ago for prosecution.

Now Strauss-Kahn has become the most prominent individual spit out by a police investigation into an alleged pimping operation that saw sex workers from brothels across the border in Belgium brought to France for orgies in Lille and Paris. Yet another Strauss-Kahn lawyer told a French radio station his client had admitted to participating in some of these orgies, with one lady on the meter perhaps even flown to “entertain” him in Washington while he was still managing director of the IMF. Strauss-Kahn’s defence is that he never knowingly paid for sex.

As in Canada — where an Ontario Appeal Court decision handed down earlier this week, if it stands, would essentially wipe out the illegality of bordellos — prostitution is not against the law in France. But the charge laid relates to the habitual operation of a prostitution racket, while “aggressive” means involved with that pimping racket on a “regular” basis as facilitator, not just customer, and profiting from it. Conviction could result in a sentence of up to 20 years.

It’s not that Strauss-Kahn has yet again been caught with his pants down. It’s that he’s allegedly been caught with his knavery out. Not the seductive Lothario — the image he’s always cultivated — but a seedy sex supplicant and profiteer whose mea non culpa depends on proving he never literally paid his own carnal freight.

As pathetic as Silvio Berlusconi, his fellow Euro-creep, yet more a crook.

The French are nonchalant about sexual follies. But the Folies Strauss-Kahn is a farce that no longer amuses. It reeks.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com